Istanbul: Memories and the City

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely (Knopf), presents Istanbul as a palimpsest in which can be read the fading traces of empires Christian and Muslim, of childhood, and of a European gaze that once contemplated Istanbul as a site of the exotic and the esoteric. The city at the heart of memory in this book was once at the centre of an empire, and is now on the periphery of empires, forced to withdraw into a species of hiding, which has the effect of drawing its citizens (citizen Pamuk, at least) “closer to our fabulous past.” The past is everywhere in this book, which is punctuated generously with family photographs and many examples of the work of Ara Güller, a street photographer of great ability. “To see the city in black and white,” Pamuk writes, “is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end of empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease.” Last year Pamuk was charged by Turkish authorities with “insulting Turkishness,” in connection with certain remarks that he had made in public confirming the Armenian genocide. The charges were dropped early this year, perhaps as a result of the mocking laughter emerging from the European Union to which Turkey is still seeking admission. Istanbul is a wonderful book; it will make you remember your own city: “to discover that the place in which we have grown up . . . did not in fact exist a hundred years before our birth is to feel like a ghost looking back on life, to shudder in the face of time.”